I have to share this.  Number forty nine one of my favorites. What a genius idea!

50 People You Wish You Knew

More Bear Homes

The women's upstairs bathroom in Art building:

The men's upstairs bathroom in Art building:

Project Part 1- Kansas :-)

I carved these little bears while I was in Kansas.  I didn't carve as many as I wanted to so I'm going to keep carving them.  I have most of them with me still.  I left two in Kansas.  I am thinking now about other places I can put them to get different people to interact with them.

I left this one in front of someone's house

 I am thinking now about other places I can put them to get different people to interact with them.

I Want It All!

So next week I am going to Kansas for thanksgiving break.  I am excited to see by brother and his wife and children, and I am really really really excited to see my boyfriend! It is a great coincidence that his family lives in Kansas City as well.  I think that this trip will be a good opportunity to do something with my final project. I have often joked around with my family (usually at the expense of my brother's wife who was born in Topeka and has lived in Kansas her whole life) about Kansas' lack of beautiful natural things.  We complain that there are no big trees, no valleys, no mountains, and therefore no mountain animals.  I would like to poke fun at this and at the same time offer a gift to Kansas to make up for it a little bit.  So for next week I'm carving mountain animals (most likely bears).  I'm going to bring them to Kansas and leave them in different locations at different public bathrooms so that different people might see them.  I am also considering maybe putting them in people's mailboxes.  I think it's an interesting thing- when you go to a gallery you know that it is a common space and everyone feels equally uncomfortable (or comfortable depending on how you look at it).  But say you put all the gallery paintings in a random person's house and then had everyone come over to their house for the show.  They would feel extremely uncomfortable because it's interfering with their personal space.  It also seems really forceful, intrusive, and direct.  I like that it would be direct and I know for sure that people have to interact with the sculptures in some way.  Maybe they will last a couple minutes until they get thrown away, who knows.  Of course you know that there are many different mountain animals in Kansas that are just as real as my soap carvings (which is not real at all), if you take into account stuffed animals and the like. So I am not giving them anything they do not have in that sense.  But how many people in Kansas, or anywhere for that matter, are going to wake up next week, go check their mail, and find a little bear carving interacting politely with their mail?  I am unable to answer that question as I cannot predict the future.  But I can guarantee that at least a few select people in Olathe, Kansas will!!!  Boo ya.

I'll photograph anything I do.

I like this song a lot.  It makes me feel hopeful for the future, on the edge, and weirdly infinite.

The Flies- Bitter Moon

Unknowns and Freedom

I can't stop thinking about travelling lately.  I watched this documentary about a guy who traveled around for a month just using craigslist.  It makes me feel extremely nostalgic, and regretful that I didn't have a camera guy following me around when I was a wanderer.  It was a great documentary and I am so glad that this guy had the courage to leave everything behind and go be a wanderer.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486616/

I want to do that again so badly!!! I loved meeting new people everyday and sleeping in a new place every night.  I remember sleeping on a night bus to Istanbul, sleeping on a night ferry to Crete another night (just on the floor in front of some seats, sleeping on a bench the first night in Barcelona cause I got in really late and had no where to stay, and one night in Rome I just slept on the sidewalk by a warm-ish vent.  I was so grateful when I actually got to sleep on a bed, have access to a bathroom, really just to be sleeping indoors was a win!  I felt so lucky when someone would give me food too.  I feel like feeding someone and giving them a place to stay is one of the most noble, kindest things a person can do.  I am still in contact with a lot of the people I stayed with and I hope to see them again someday.  I love all the unknowns and the freedom.

I have been thinking about travelling, grad school, and what I'm going to do after graduation a lot in the past month or so.  So much so that it's distracting me hard core from the things I have to do right now.  It has been difficult for me to stay focused for sure.  I think all the time about next year, and I am distracted a lot by how much I miss my boyfriend.  It is best for me to stay busy so I started working 25 ish hours a week.  But that is way too much for me to be working and now I'm excited for next semester when I will not schedule myself for so many hours.  I have been dealing with jobs a lot this semester too.  I had multiple interviews for being an orientation counselor next summer and right now I'm waiting to here back from them.  I had an interview just today for a new job as a rec supervisor for next semester. I am not happy anymore at the Children's Center and I don't want to just stick it out until I graduate.  I am still happy at Challenge though, so I will keep that job.

None of this has anything to do with art (sorry!).  These are the things I am thinking about non stop now everyday.

Awesome Starling Video!

The birds remind me of a giant school of fish. They both have the same maneuvers and group-think. I think it's really lovely.  Also, nearly every Discovery clip is super cool to me. If I ever have cable someday, maybe i'll get the Discovery Channel.  Or work for them someday...

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/falcon-feeding-frenzy/pdqm5e7?q=Animal+Planet&rel=msn&from=en-us_msnhp&form=msnrll

Colors colors...

Concerning organizing my room into colors:

I organized my closet and my possessions by color for many years throughout middle school and high school.  This was not to be artistic, it was one of my many ocd tendencies.  Doing this again now under my own free will feels strange.  It was difficult for me the first time around to let go and let things just be, and as my room is currently in the state that it was for many stressful years, I can't help but remember all that stress.  I remember it, but I do not feel it now, which is a good thing I suppose.  Now I can focus more on the spacial relations and implications brought up rather than the need to have everything be straight, as well as color coded.

I am thinking about a specific part of Joseph Albers' book Interaction of Color. He writes, "As it is with people in our daily life, so it is with color."  He goes on to say, "Therefore, we try to recognize our preferences and our aversions -- what colors dominate in our work; what colors, on the other hand, are rejected, disliked, or of no appeal.  Usually a special effort in using disliked colors ends with our falling in love with them."

I definitely have a bias towards the color blue.  It has always been my favorite color because my dad and I are the only ones in my family with blue eyes (the other three having green, brown, or hazel eyes), and it always made me feel special and connected to him because of that. I noticed that of the things I own that I purchased (things which came in multiple color options), the majority are blue.  I know the color blue is tied into feelings of calmness and serenity.  Maybe this is why I have purchased almost only blue things when I have a choice.  I bought my dresser from walmart and it is blue. I remember it came in different colors, but I don't remember considering other colors or deciding on blue.  Organizing all my stuff by color has brought it to my realization that I have a subconscious bias towards blue and it has influenced me more strongly than I would have thought.  My dresser, my blankets, the Greek flag on my wall, my towel hanging on my chair, my yoga mat lying on my floor, the tie-dye sarong hanging on the wall above my bed- they are all blue! I think this is weird now that I am thinking about it so much.  Perhaps the color blue reminds me of my family and so that is why I like it so much? I am not too sure.  Maybe it's as simply as, it's just my favorite color and that's all there is to it. I really don't know.

Hubble pictures

These pictures really blow my mind! I was thinking today about the evolution of painting after the invention of the camera. And how now, some painters are so realistic that their pieces look like photographs, and some photographers try to be "painterly." These photos look very painterly to me, although I'm not sure if I could give a definition of what that means exactly. I love the colors and the overwhelming sense of mystery.  I imagine these leave almost everyone in awe after they see them for the first time.

http://hubblesite.org/gallery/album/show/nebula/

My Geocaching "adventure"

Yesterday I went on four geocaching hunts.  Unfortunately I was consistently unsuccessful at every spot.  I don't know when everyone on the planet got an iPhone.  Am I the only one who doesn't care about apps?  I know not everyone has an iPhone, but sometimes it feels that way to me.  Well, I still have my brick of a flip phone and unless some stranger off the street offers to buy one for me, I have no intention of getting an iPhone.  So doing this geocaching challenge was, well, challenging.  It was challenging mentally, and emotionally.  To find the locations I joined the geocaching website so I was able to see the coordinates of the caches.  I found a website that allowed me to type in the coordinates and would then show me a dot on a map of pullman.  I drew my own little makeshifts maps as best I could and replicated the location of the dot.  I was not too worried because it seemed like these things would not be buried beneath the ground.  Maybe they actually were.

I was able to do this in the first place just because my mom decided to come visit me for the day.  I don't have a car or anything so it was nice that she came with me to do it and let me use her car.  The first spot was at a SEL sign on Terreview.  I really thought it was going to be right by the sign, but there was nothing but bark.  I walked under the scratchy branches and through the bushes, but I didn't see anything noteworthy and decided to give up after ten minutes of looking rather than drive myself crazy searching for something that might not even be there. 

The second spot was at the intersection of Terreview and Grand.  The map online showed that it was on a trail right off the road.  There was a trail there, and again I walked around looking behind everything and under everything, but I didn't see anything.  My mom was giving her input and I know she was just trying to help but she was confused about how the whole geocaching thing was supposed to work.   She kept asking me what exactly we were looking for, where it was, isn't it supposed to be here?  So as my frustration grew, hers did too and the "adventure" started to feel more like a sentence.  I tried to stay positive, but because it was hot and tiring, my mom was having less and less fun.  

The third location was Terreview Park.  There was a gazebo right where the dot was on my map so I was confident that I would find something at last.  Again, I was left itemless.  I walked around the whole park basically, looking under bushes and I even looked all over, and under, the playground equipment.  I did see the birdie for badminton and a wiffle ball in the bushes. So that was pretty exciting.  The best part was that there was a large family there playing on the big toys, flying kites, and hanging out in the gazebo.  They were watching me the entire time I was snooping around, and their glares let me know that my creeperness was not welcome.  I definitely felt like I did not belong there at that moment.  Nobody asked me what I was doing (for all they knew I could have been looking for a lost diamond ring).  The kites were really lovely to see against the blue sky, I'm glad I got to see that.  Now I am thinking about kites more, maybe I'll paint one.  Or I'll do a painting of something else but inspired by a kite. Hmmm...

So the last spot was at Military Hill Park.  At this point, I had got my mom a large ice tea and I parked the car under the shade so she could wait peacefully in the car and cool off while I went searching.  I walked around for about fifteen minutes, kind of mentally gave up, and sat down in the shade and called my boyfriend to say hi.  I had a nice conversation with him about both of our mothers' capacities to stay calm in uncomfortable situations, and then I walked back to the car and woke up my mom from her nap.  

I enjoyed getting to see parts of Pullman that I had never seen before.  I had never been to Terreview Park or Military Hill Park.  Even though my mom and I were kind of arguing the whole time, it was nice that she wanted to come with me to try it out.  She said that some of her friends had done it before and I could tell before we had even started that she was already eager to tell them about it.  So because I don't have an iPhone or a gps, I basically just got as close to the spot on my "replica" map as I could and i just kind of aimlessly walked around.  I had never heard of geocaching before this, and I still have no idea what I was looking for. A box of some kind?  Were all the items supposed to be together in a bag or was there no specific container holding them?  I looked up what geocaching was all about and I guess it's just a way for people to go on treasure hunts and feel connected to their community.  I think I would have been more successful if I had a gps.

One thing I did really like:  at the spot on the trail at Terreview and Grand, I was walking around beneath a large pine tree and for a moment I got a sensation and a memory of a place called Turnbull Wildlife Refuge.  It's a refuge that is next to the town I grew up in and my dad would take us there all the time. We'd walk on trails, climb little hills, see cool animals (or just their footprints or poop sometimes), and the smell of pine needles fills the air.  When I was that close to pine needles the smell brought me back to being a little kid and playing in Turnbull. And then I smiled, and I was happy to think about Turnbull again.